One of the keys to making your website your number 1 employee is actually getting people to your website. Although there are a lot of methods being promoted for getting traffic to your site, here are a few to avoid.

1) Link Directory Submitter

Sure, your Google ranking is affected by who is linking to your website. However, that doesn’t mean that more is better. Link Directory Submitter is bad news for a lot of reasons. First, if your website goes from no inbound links to 2,000+ overnight, don’t you think Google is smart enough to figure out it was done by a software program? And as soon as they do, they will discount all the links. Second, you are known by the company you keep. Not only will it not help your website to have 2,000 inbound links from a Chinese spam farm, it will actually hurt your ranking to be associated with them. A quality link-building campaign is a lot of work, but well worth the effort.

2) Buying canned content

Yes, Google likes to see fresh, relevant content on your website every week. But what they hate to see is the same content repeated on hundreds of different pages. One sure way to get your website de-ranked is to post the same articles that are being sold to lots of other people. If you’re going to blog, hire someone to actually write the content, or better yet, write it yourself.

3) Buying a bunch of domains

Back when a lot of people still had not heard of the Internet (Yes, Virginia, I’m old enough to remember those days), when someone wanted to find a product or service, they would simply type it into the address bar. (JoethePlumber.com anyone?) It made sense then to register a bunch of search-term domains and point them to your site. Nowadays, people use a search engine to find what they want. And, contrary to popular belief, having a bunch of domains pointing to your site has no value for search engine optimization. In fact, if they are pointed incorrectly, you can even hurt your search engine ranking. So, save your $20 and go buy your spouse some flowers instead.

These three methods of “driving traffic” are persistent myths, but myths nonetheless. To learn more about how to actually get good rankings and real traffic to your website, here are some posts that may help.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was considered to be one of the greatest artists of his day, and has been considered so ever since. Some of his most famous works, the Pieta and David, were made when he was only in his twenties. His crowning achievement, though, may be the work he did not want to do.

In 1508, Michelangelo began painting the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel at the request of Pope Julius II. Michelangelo maintained that he was not a painter. All he wanted to do was sculpt statues. But the Pope was pretty persistent, and eventually Michelangelo agreed to paint the ceiling “for God.” It took him four years of physically exhausting work to complete it.

One thing that Michelangelo insisted on was that he would only do the ceiling if the Pope let him paint it in his own way. In fact, the Pope had hired five other skilled painters to come be Michelangelo’s helpers. Whenever they came to the chapel, though, they found the doors barred and locked. Eventually they gave up and went back home.

This is a common characteristic of many great artists. You can tell them what you want done, but don’t tell them how to do it. And they don’t want any help with their art.

Great designers operate the same way, because they are artists. Great designers are emotionally invested in their work, because good design IS art. Art with a purpose, yes, but art nonetheless. If you want to control the process of your web design, don’t hire an artist. Hire a run-of-the-mill graphic designer. There’s a place for that. Sometimes you just want someone who can execute your vision. But if you want something great, if you want a design that really makes a statement, then hire a great artist and then turn him or her loose.

Also, be sure to give really good directions up front. If your web design must incorporate photos of your store and management team, that is not something to stick in after the fact. Likewise, the time to rewrite the copy is before the design is started, not after it’s finished. If you commissioned a painting of a landscape, and then after it was done asked for a lake painted in the middle, you would lose the inspiration and the creativity. In the same way, a web design as a work of art needs clear parameters and then inspiration with freedom of movement. Otherwise, it becomes production work and not great art.

When I was in Germany with my wife, one of the things I wanted to buy was a genuine Swiss Army Knife. The Swiss Army Knife is a really cool pocket knife that has all kinds of tools attached to it. It seems it can do anything!

However, no matter how cool the Swiss army knife is, would you use it to remodel your house? Having a one-size-fits-all, general utility tool is great, but it also has its limits. When I am doing a bigger job, I prefer to use specialized power tools.

When you build a website for your business, what tools do you use? Many small business owners hire a “jackknife” to create their site — the one guy in a garage who does the design work, the programming, the copy editing, the server setup, and the SEO.

The “jack of all trades,” like the Swiss Army Knife, may be an inexpensive “tool” that can get you out of a jam. Yet experienced business owners understand that a truly effective website is built by a team. No one person can be good in all the different skills needed to build a website that is your #1 employee.

Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson is remembered as England’s most beloved admiral. His innovative style of warfare is responsible for the total defeat of the French and Spanish fleets and the rise of the British Royal Navy to supremacy at sea.

His decisive battle (and the one at which he lost his life) was the battle of Trafalgar. 27 British ships took on a line of 33 Spanish and French Ships. At the end of the day 22 enemy ships were captured or sunk, without a single British ship lost! The style of his attack during that battle was called “crossing the T.”

There is a common misconception that crossing the T meant lining up the ships so that the entire British fleet could fire on one French ship at a time. This is absolutely not the case. Crossing the T actually meant two things:

1) An absolute, all-out attack on the enemy aiming for total victory, and

2) A distribution of command so that individual ship captains could make decisions on their own during the heat of battle.

At the time, traditional naval warfare required a careful maneuvering of ships to keep them all in a line. This allowed the admiral to communicate with and control his entire fleet, and it also allowed the fleet to escape quickly if the battle went poorly. Usually, this resulted in fairly indecisive battles.

Instead of lining up with the combined French and Spanish fleet, Nelson split his force into two lines and plowed right into the middle of the Combined Fleet’s line. Each of his captains understood the plan of attack, and each was empowered to make independent decisions during the battle. This put all the British ships into a very vulnerable position, where they had to fight fiercely to win. But it also cut off communications between the enemy ships.

The resulting battle was chaotic, furious, ferocious — and decisive.

What have you been doing with your Internet marketing? Has it involved years of careful but hesitant lining up of your forces, but without any decisive results? If so, it’s time to take some real action.

I had a meeting yesterday with two highly motivated entrepreneurs. They have a small brick-and-mortar store with a niche product in an underserved area, and their store is profitable and growing.

Last year, they got a quote from a friend of mine to build their new e-commerce site, but instead found someone else to build it for only $800. In the process, they saved themselves over $3,000. Pretty smart, don’t you think?

That is, until you consider the costs. In the meeting yesterday, they said they were very happy with their new website, except for a few minor issues:

(1) They are unable to edit any of the product descriptions without breaking the site.

(2) They have not yet gotten any sales from the website.

(3) The site does not show up in Google searches…even when you search on their name.

(4) Many of the pages take 30-90 seconds to load.

(5) Their web guy is no longer answering their phone calls or emails.

Considering their market opportunity, a website that was built correctly should be earning at least $5,000 a month for them. They said they would be happy to have $2,000 a month in online sales. In reality, their new site is COSTING THEM more than $20,000 per year in lost profits. How much of a bargain is that?

Have you seen the ads lately offering to get you traffic to your website? For only $5, you can get 50 people to click through to your website.

Really? It’s amazing how these people confuse cause and effect. Of course, if you want your website to SELL MORE and get you more customers, you need more visitors to the site. But the converse isn’t necessarily true. Just because you have visitors, doesn’t mean you’re going to make money.

Now, don’t confuse this with a quality pay per click program like Google AdWords or Facebook Link Click ads, where you can pay per visitor to get potential customers onto your website. I’m talking about the programs where you’re essentially paying people to visit your site.

Imagine a marketing consultant offering to help a struggling grocery store, whose “help” consists of hiring people off the street at $2 each to wander through the store. Do you think that will increase sales?

Believe it or not, most of the time the 50 people that you paid to visit your site are in fact robots programmed to look like website visitors and fool your traffic logs.

Bottom line: Many programs promising to deliver a specific amount of traffic to your website are at best a waste of money.

There are, however, many high quality SEO programs and search engine marketing programs that can make your website much more visible and bring your potential customers to your site. Feel free to invest in one of these. We’ve helped clients double, triple, and quadruple their sales with simple SEO programs.

The same thing is true for some of the programs that promise you 10,000 Twitter followers for an insanely low price. Many fake Twitter accounts are set up to auto-follow back anyone who follows them. So for only $500, their Twitter robot can get 10,000 inactive user accounts (i.e., robots) to auto-follow you back. You can look like a celebrity if you have lots of people “following” you, but what good is having 10,000 so-called “followers” if they don’t read your stuff?

Or the package where you buy 200 likes on Facebook. In reality, this only hurts your Facebook campaigns, because now with 200 fake profiles following you, your engagement scores go way down and then Facebook won’t show your content to your legitimate followers either.

Now, just to clarify, I’m not talking about a Facebook ad campaign where you’re getting potential customers to like your page. That can be really effective. I’m talking about a package where you’re buying a certain number of likes.

If you’re going to do a Facebook campaign, be sure you’re working with a legitimate marketer who’s reaching out to people that can become customers.

When you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, here’s another thing to watch out for. As many as a third of the user profiles on Facebook are fake accounts being run by robots. If you advertise to them, and they start following you, it could lower your engagement scores, which gets you into a vicious cycle of having to spend more and more money just to get your content seen by legitimate users. You want your campaign run by someone who is setting up a good target audience, to make sure you’re advertising to real people, and getting real people to engage and follow you.

There are many canned SEO programs that provide content for you to automatically post on your website. The theory is that Google likes content, so if you put fresh content on your site every day, then your website is going to rank really well.

The thing that these programs don’t tell you is that Google likes unique content. They like original content and quality content. What Google doesn’t like is content that’s been posted on 500 other websites. In fact, your website ranking can go down if you’re posting a content feed that’s used everywhere else. So many of these canned SEO programs can make your website look active, but they’re likely to hurt your search engine ranking and limit the number of potential customers who will find you. In the long run, it can reduce your traffic and sales.

So do yourself a favor if you’re investing in a program to help your social media presence, or to help your website increase its ranking, be sure you’re investing with a legitimate marketer who knows what they are doing and who uses a quality program to actually get you real content, real engagement and real results.

Get Steve in your inbox

What peopleare saying

“I have benefited so much from my work with Steve. He is such a mixture of heart, talent, and incredible intelligence, that he gets you clarity with such rapidity and ease. On one particular session where I was rather down, I opened up to a rather personal and very raw space with him. He made me perfectly comfortable to share what I was thinking and feeling. And at the perfect time, using my experiences shared on previous sessions, he asked the perfect question that shifted everything. I would recommend Steve's coaching to help you with whatever you want to accomplish. Steve is the real deal! I would recommend him to anyone committed to improving their business, themselves and their lives.”

– Carla O'Brien
Founder, Coach Carla LLC

“Steve is an excellent coach. He has the ability to listen deeply, reflect honestly, ask challenging questions, and help clients view life from a new perspective....[Steve] helped me unwrap some unconscious limiting beliefs from long ago about money. For the first time I was able to see how I’d been limiting my business growth because of my discomfort with growing wealthy. Once I became aware of that belief I was free to make new choices. On to prosperity!...[Steve] is simply a great coach with outstanding listening skills.”

– Joan Hoedel, MA, RN, CPC
Blue Dragonfly Coaching, Missoula MT

“I’ve been working with Steve for the past four months, and on a scale from 1 to 10, his integrity is a 12. His professionalism and dedication are at the same level also.”